Receipt Capture and Job Allocation

Receipts accumulate in truck gloveboxes and jacket pockets. Supplier invoices pile up unreconciled in email. By the time a contractor or fabricator gets around to batch-entering everything on a Saturday night, some documents have gone missing and there is no way to tell which job each expense belongs to. CPAs find the gaps at year-end, when nothing can be done about them. The people who feel this most directly are small BC contractors running five to fifteen active jobs, metal shops juggling fifty to a hundred fabrication orders a year, and the CPAs who serve both of them.

The stack

Dext Starter ($24/mo USD) is the primary pick. The mobile app opens a camera view, reads the supplier name, date, amount, and line items via OCR, and pushes a categorized draft entry into QuickBooks Online before you pull out of the supplier parking lot. Supplier invoices that arrive by email go to a dedicated Dext inbox address and route automatically. Dext processes documents in seconds and has trained well on Canadian supplier formats.

The Canadian-hosted alternative is LedgerDocs ($25–$35/mo CAD, Canadian servers). CPAs serving clients with SIN-containing documents, or firms under scrutiny from CPABC about PIPEDA compliance, should choose LedgerDocs over Dext. The OCR-to-QBO workflow is functionally equivalent. Dext’s Canadian data residency is unconfirmed; LedgerDocs explicitly stores documents on Canadian infrastructure.

Both connect to QuickBooks Online ($40–$80/mo), which is where the job-level categorization happens. The combination costs $64–$115/mo before QBO fees.

How it gets wired

1. QBO chart of accounts is set up with job-level cost categories first — materials, subcontractors, equipment rental, consumables — mapped to the job costing structure in JobTread (contractors) or Knowify (fabricators).
2. Dext or LedgerDocs connects to QBO via OAuth. Supplier rules get configured: when a receipt comes from “Rona” or “Emco”, Dext pre-fills the expense category. When an invoice references a known PO number, it routes to that job automatically.
3. Photo-from-field workflow: crew members photograph delivery slips on arrival. The document hits Dext, gets parsed, and sits in a review queue. The owner or bookkeeper reviews and approves the job allocation — a 30-second task per receipt rather than a Saturday data-entry session.
4. Email-in workflow for supplier invoices: the Dext inbox address goes into the supplier contact record in QBO. Invoices that arrive by email are forwarded automatically, no manual download required.
5. Batch PO handling: when one purchase order covers materials for three active jobs, Dext supports line-item splitting. Each line item gets allocated to the appropriate job in QBO, so material costs land where they belong rather than sitting unallocated on an overhead account.
6. Daily capture cadence: the habit is photograph same day, approve same day. Weekly batch review is the fallback, not the standard.

Compliance posture

QBO Canada stores financial data on Canadian servers. Dext’s servers are outside Canada — firms with confidentiality obligations around client financial records (CPA practices serving regulated clients, contractors with signed NDAs covering financial data) should use LedgerDocs, which stores documents in Canada and can provide a data processing agreement on request.

PIPEDA applies to any business in BC that collects, uses, or discloses personal information in the course of commercial activity. Supplier invoices containing GST numbers, individual names, or contact information qualify. The safe path for CPA practices is LedgerDocs; contractors and fabricators capturing their own receipts face lower risk but should still confirm their processor’s data residency if they handle subcontractor information.

GST/HST input tax credits depend on complete, legible receipts with supplier name, date, amount, and GST number. Dext and LedgerDocs both capture and store the source image alongside the extracted data, which satisfies CRA documentation requirements for digital records under IC05-1R1.

Common pitfalls

Job-level categorization depth. Out of the box, QBO’s expense categories are too broad for real job costing. If “materials” is a single account rather than a class or job code, you can’t distinguish between material costs on job A and job B. Configure class tracking or job costing in QBO before connecting Dext, or the allocation step has nowhere useful to land.

Supplier name variation. The same supplier appears in Dext as “Home Depot”, “Home Depot Canada”, and “HD #7234” depending on which store and which receipt format. Without a supplier merge rule, three separate training profiles develop and categorization accuracy drops. Audit and merge supplier names in the first two weeks.

Multi-currency. BC contractors working across the border or buying materials invoiced in USD need multi-currency enabled in QBO before Dext connects. Enabling it after the fact requires a QBO plan upgrade and can disrupt existing reconciliations. Confirm upfront.

Approval lag. If receipts sit in the review queue for more than a week, job cost reports become unreliable during active jobs. The capture step is only half of the workflow; the approval and allocation step needs a daily owner — whether that is the operator, the bookkeeper, or the business owner during a morning check-in.

When this is worth the setup

This workflow pays off when a business has more than two active jobs running simultaneously, captures more than 40 receipts and supplier invoices per month, or has a CPA who charges by the hour to clean up gaps at year-end. For contractors billing $300k and up, the combination of captured costs and accurate job profitability typically surfaces $10,000–$25,000 in previously invisible expenses within the first 90 days. For CPAs serving multiple clients, LedgerDocs running across five or more client files reduces manual document handling enough to recover several billable hours per week.

Single-job businesses or sole proprietors under $150k in revenue may find the overhead of a daily capture habit outweighs the benefit. For them, monthly batch review with a bookkeeper is proportionate.